April 2007 Archives

You've got to love reciprocal link spammers! Their emails are great! I got this one earlier today:

Dear owner of http://www.xxxxx.xxxx, I'm the webmaster of http://www.xxxx.xxxx. We came across your site on the Internet and feel that it would fit perfectly into our collection of quality software-related links at http://www.xxxx.xxxx. The Google PR of this site is currently 0. We've already placed a link to your web site along with a description at our site on the http://www.xxxx.xxxx/links38.html page, which we encourage you to check for accuracy. We'd appreciate it if you place a link back to our site using the following HTML code (just copy and paste it into your links page): xxxxxxxxx.com - xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx If you'd like the description of your site modified, the category changed, or if you have any other cross-promotion ideas, feel free to email us. Please note that if you don't place a reciprocal link to us somewhere on your site within a week, the link to your site will automatically be removed from our directory. Please link to us using the code above, and let us know where we can find the link. Best regards, xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx This is NOT SPAM -- this is a one-time reciprocal link request. We have NO INTENTION to email you again. You can also reply to this email with REMOVE in the subject line to make sure we'll NEVER send you any more e-mails in the future. ----------------------------------- Powered with LinkAssistant SEO Tool http://www.link-assistant.com/ -----------------------------------

I've edited it heavily to remove reference to the spammed site and the spammer. What made me laugh was the footer. If it's not spam why are you sending it to "the owner of xxx.com"? If you know who I am then you know what my name is. I also love the way the person using the software didn't edit the boilerplate email that well and left in the "software related links" line. Considering the mail was aimed at a site to do with the tourism industry I can see that getting a few raised eyebrows...

There will be a general election in Ireland in the next few weeks and we'll all have to listen to the various politicians going on about how much they'll do for the Irish economy. But do the politicians actually use Irish companies to provide them with services such as hosting and domain registration? There's a thread over on boards.ie which is quite revealing. It seems that Sinn Fein are the biggest offenders of the lot! They seem to be 100% hosted in the US (courtesy of Pair). So much for republicans? This lack of support for Irish business was also mentioned here as well, and ties in with the GAA's total lack of support for Irish jobs.

Tom Doyle of 2Bscene's a dad! Congratulations and best wishes to both of you (or should I say all three?)

According to an article in Silicon Republic, Carlow town is supposed to be going wireless as of today. Niall did a bit of investigating into the article's claims earlier during the day, but couldn't find out a lot. Not surprising really when you consider that one of the providers mentioned doesn't even have a functioning website! Later this evening he did a bit of "war driving" and found a number of active nodes. It would be nice if we'd a bit more info. I live about 5 minutes walk from the council offices and the local Fianna Fail candidate managed to send me useless junk mail, so getting something I might find useful would make a pleasant change ...

I got a hardcopy of "The DOGS Directory" with this month's issue of Irish Marketing Journal (they actually offer an online version of the magazine as well even if it's not mentioned on their site), however the website that was previously accepting submissions is no longer online. I'd have expected a "definitive" guide to anything online to have an online presence... Weird!

Series 5 of Scrubs is due for release at the end of May. You can pre-order it on CD WOW or Amazon

As I mentioned some time ago, the Wordpress site does not list ANY non-US hosting companies. They're now running an adwords campaign with the text "Top 5 Wordpress Web hosts, Chosen by the users & developers of the WordPress blogging software" Lovely! They won't list non-US hosts and they expect the public to swallow their bull about the listed providers having been "chosen" So, my question is... Does anyone know of an alternate blogging software / platform that isn't so US-centric?

As promised here are the slides from the talk I gave this afternoon in Mullingar. IIA Blogging Presentation

Head Rambles runs into issues with Sky's customer service: The Devil Wears Prada but doesn’t speak English I feel his pain! Justin Mason explains why Blacklist.ie is rubbish: Don’t worry about Blacklist.ie Ken rips into ripe.ie: Ireland's leading Web design company puts the rest to shame

I know I should have mentioned this earlier, but I've been rather busy with other things recently.... In any case I'll be in Mullingar tomorrow for an IIA event: Using the Internet and Blogging to Increase Sales, which is being held in conjunction with Westmeath County Enterprise Board My talk will be on blogging in general, which is incredibly vague :) Basically I'll be looking at covering basic topics through to the more advanced ones in about 30 minutes (my allotted time slot!).

Most people have literacy problems. They won't admit to it, but they don't really understand a lot of what they see before them. Can you imagine if all toilets were to start using this style of signage? (click to enlarge)

Over the last few weeks I've been getting an increasing amount of email from various departments in Microsoft. Most of the email is rubbish. It's not just that the content isn't very good, but some of it is emails to tell me about emails that I should get in the future. Oh come on! It's email for God's sake! I don't need an email from Microsoft to tell me about another email I should be getting. The volume of these mails, which also includes a silly number of surveys (without any incentive to complete them), has reached a point where I now just delete the messages without reading them. Setting the correct frequency and volume in your marketing message makes all the difference. It's a pity Microsoft can't get it right

Cormac has posted a bit about blogs that do follow. Both this blog and the company one "follow" links - as they should.

Dell will ship XP preinstalled on new PCs again. It seems that people were none too impressed with Vista being forced on them and the hardware vendor had no choice but to do an about face. full story

I mentioned the beta of Amazon's context ads a few weeks ago. Before I could give it any form of review I wanted to let it run on a couple of sites to see how well it worked, so for the last couple of weeks it has been active both here and on IWF. What I've found is that the code causes the pages to display a little oddly - it adds an extra couple of lines to the footer for some strange reason. That isn't much of an issue, but it did surprise me at first. What I was more interested in finding out was how well the system handled the ads ie. if they are truly contextual or not. IWF has a lot of textual content, though it would not be as dense as this site, as you can easily have threads that are only one or two short messages long. In general the ads served lacked context, as they seemed to be generated on one or two keywords in the text and not based on the whole corpus. I kept on seeing links to guide books about Ireland, for example, which would not fit with the site's theme at all. On this site, however, the ads seem to be more contextual, though again I get the feeling that it is only using one or two keywords to generate the advert. A recent post on Eragon, for example, is currently displaying two ads related to the film and the original book, while the third is based on something totally unrelated. In conclusion I can see that the system might work well with review sites or similar, where the textual content in the articles is keyword rich and densely focussed around particular themes, as the ads on review-like posts seem to be a lot better. In terms of click through rates I can't really draw any meaningful conclusions.

The next Kathy Reichs novel, Bones To Ashes, will be released this autumn. I've just pre-ordered a copy on Amazon.com I'm still trying to decide if I want to pre-order Harry Potter or simply wait until the weekend of the release and pick up a copy in a local bookshop....

Does anyone know if there is a mechanism for reporting false claims in Google Adword campaigns ie. paid ads that Google Adword publishers run on the search and content networks? I've come across a few that are highly misleading, but I can't see any way to report them.

A lot of people would agree that the only portion of the online industry that has consistently made money was the adult entertainment portion. While a lot of geeks may get excited by IPV6 it's going to be an uphill struggle to convince the rest of the world to start using it. So what would happen if you were to combine IPV6 with Porn? It's an intriguing question and judging by the IPV6 Experiment's site, some people are interested in finding out. Basically they're going to offer a load of premium adult content for free to users who can connect to it over ipv6. Full details on the site NB: The project / experiment is not live yet NOTE:If this turns out to be an elaborate April Fool's it's a damn fine one!

I realise that cinematic adaptations of novels are merely that - adaptations, so you come to expect certain degrees of difference between the source (the novel) and the derivative product (the film). In the case of Eragon, however, the film could best be described as "inspired by", as it couldn't possibly have been based on Paolini's first novel, or if it was then a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor. In the novel there is character development. While it may not be possible to transpose all the subtleties of characters' thoughts and emotions to the big screen you would have expected them to at least have made an effort. The core of the novel is the relationship between the main character, Eragon, and his dragon, Saphira. Whereas in the book you come to have an understanding of who Eragon is the film presents a very flat character. Saphira suffers an equal treatment. The original book features a dragon that grows from being very small to being quite large over a reasonable period of time - while I can appreciate the director's desire to speed things up a bit it was really annoying to see the baby dragon turn into a full grown one in the space of about two minutes! Yes, I know it's fantasy, but even fantasy has to be vaguely plausible and that was just one of the many flaws. I could go on, but it's simply pointless. If you've read either of Paolini's novels then don't ruin them renting this DVD. On a plus side the cast aren't that bad - it's just the script that really really let them all down.

Following on Verisign's price increase, Afilias are set to follow suit. In a letter sent to ICANN a couple of days ago Roland LaPlante announced a planned price increase effective from October 15. The annual fee will increase to $6.15

John mentions that the IEDR have finally done something about porn.ie and added it to the blocklist: blacknight@siracusa:~$ whois porn.ie % Rights restricted by copyright; http://www.domainregistry.ie/copyright.html % Do not remove this notice domain: porn.ie descr: Forbidden descr: Discretionary Applicant descr: Discretionary Name admin-c: IH4-IEDR tech-c: IH4-IEDR renewal: 12-April-2107 status: Active nserver: ns0.domainregistry.ie nserver: banba.domainregistry.ie source: IEDR person: IEDR Hostmaster nic-hdl: IH4-IEDR source: IEDR I'd applied for the domain on several occasions over the past couple of years in protest against one of the IEDR's naming policies - see my previous posts: Is the Irish Internet Prudish? Irish Adult Content? Hot Sexual Romps on the Irish Internet

Some charmer decided to tag me, so I feel semi-obliged to rise to the challenge. So why do I blog? I started blogging for a couple of reasons. On the one hand I wanted to play with the blogging software. I'd seen people using Movable Type and it looked pretty nifty and I also thought it would be handy to know what our clients were likely to ask for in the future (at the time the company was a hell of a lot smaller!) The other side of it was that I actually enjoy writing. That's not to say that I write particularly well (or particularly badly), but I've always enjoyed doing it. When I was in college I managed to fund a part of my studies by writing for a newspaper from time to time. I've always been into language, which is probably what drew me to studying more than one language in college and spending so much time overseas. Since I started blogging about 4 years ago I've found it very relaxing. In some cases it provides a space for a little rant (a common enough use of blogs!), whereas in others it's a handy way of seeking advice / help from others. Of course you can still do this on forums and mailing lists, but the structure of blogs and blogging lends itself to certain uses with greater ease.... I also use my blog as an "aide memoire". If I find a solution to a problem or a handy link I may shove it on this blog (or one of my other ones) so that I can find it later. Of course if I only had one blog it wouldn't be too bad, but I seem to have developed a mild addiction, so instead of one or two I seem to have spawned more than half a dozen. Not all of them are actively maintained, but some of them are more active than others. For example I Squatted Your .eu is quite active at the moment as so much is going on with .eu (or isn't going on with it, depending on your point of view) For a long time this blog was seen by some people as the unofficial Blacknight blog, which wasn't really my intention. Of course it's a bit hard to separate me (a human being) from Blacknight - the company that I started, so that connection was kind of logical, although it wasn't my intention. In the end of course I setup an official blog for the company.... Enough of this ! So let's see who I should tag: John (his blog name was simply asking for it!) Bernie Frank Jothan Anthony

Words are powerful if wielded carefully. The choice of words can make all the difference, so it was with much amusement that I read a snippet on ENN earlier today:

Listen up banks: Women are worth IT In a lesson no doubt relevant to Irish banks, Britain's banking sector has been told to jizz up its customer databases to effectively target the female market.

full text is here(my emphasis) What an "interesting" choice of words. I presume they meant "jazz up". A quick Google for the word "jizz" yields some rather colourful results.

I mentioned a couple of days ago about how the Sky Movies site was broken. I didn't realise that they hadn't restricted their "inventiveness" to that channel's site alone. They've also done a very "good" job on the sports channels as well!

Domainer's Magazine is finally offering PDF versions online. There maybe a charge at some point, but it's currently free You can find the PDF version by going to the subscriptions section EDIT: The first two issues will be available for free. From the 3rd issue onwards subscription will be required.

If you're into statistics and domains this might be of interest: Takeup of .mobi in Ireland

Over a year has passed since I posted about Verisign's unique position in relation to .com and .net Yesterday they announced the first price increases.

VeriSign announced that as of Oct. 15, 2007, the registry fee for .com domain names will increase from $6.00 to $6.42 and that the registry fee for .net domain names will increase, from $3.50 to $3.85. This will be the first registry fee increase for .com and .net since the fee structure was put in place by ICANN in 1999.

The increases are not huge, but it should be interesting to see what some of the budget registrars do. At present several of them are selling .com to their resellers with incredibly tight margins. While other companies, such as eNom and Tucows seem to be able to offer high levels of service as their USP, the budget registrars seem to have been gaining market share on price alone. The last quarter of 2007 should see some interesting changes

Sometimes site redesigns are wonderful. Sometimes they are a disaster. Sky has recently redone the Sky Movies site and to say that it is a disaster from a user perspective it putting it mildly. As a Sky subscriber I go to the Sky Movies site for one reason - to see what is on and when. I can no longer do that. The "Movie Planner" was only showing the free to air channels when I tried it a couple of days ago. It's now returning no results at all. If you navigate using their "improved" categorisation (and changed channel names) you get loads of totally useless information. For example, "Man on Fire" is listed as showing tonight, but they've left out the all important bit of information - when! The old site was not without its flaws and quirks, but at least you could get the information you needed!

The Irish Internet Association's website has been offline for most of today. Why? Well put simply the domain has vanished from DNS, so it's impossible for anyone to reach it. The domain is held by Esat's nameservers, but at some point in the last 24 hours someone removed it completely from their nameservers and as the IEDR's offices are closed today there is no way to move the domain to another set of nameservers even as an interim measure (ie. there are no reloads or changes to the .ie zonefile today) I spoke to the IIA's CEO Fergal O'Byrne a short time ago and he explained what had happened. It transpires that the IIA have a free account with Esat, but that their billing department seems to have raised an invoice 4 years ago for services. Although the invoice was flagged as free and to be removed it obviously wasn't ... End result being the site is offline due to a billing error. I'm sure Fergal is very impressed!

After consulting with people in the know I bought a new camera recently. It's a Canon EOS 400D with a EF-S 18-55 mm Lens. You can see some of the photos taken with it during my trip to Lisbon. The problem I now face is lens. Which ones do I need? Where can I get them? How much should I spend on them? I am lost as usual!

IDN (internationalised domain names) was one of the hot topics at the last ICANN meeting in Lisbon. In Lisbon the discussions were quite complex, as they were discussing the scope of IDN withing gTLDs ie. domains that are completely international in their nature. When it comes to a ccTLD ie. one for a particular country a lot of the more "off the wall" topics can be safely ignored. Ireland has two languages - English and Irish (Gaelic) While the English language only has one or two accents, that are applied to "borrowed" words, the Irish language had several, though this has been reduced to one - the fada. The humble fada can change the entire sound of a word (like most accents!), yet it is currently not possible to register a .ie domain using a fada. My name in Irish is Mícheál O'Nialláin (or so I've been told), yet there is currently no way for me, or anyone else, to register the domain name while preserving the correct accents. What of all the other Irish placenames? Organisations? People? Wouldn't it be nice if you could make use of accents in your .ie domain? Would people want it?

Pat mentions the EU anti-trust investigation into Apple's pricing policy for iTunes across Europe. How any company can justify price differences of up to 23% for digital downloads should make for amusing reading. Personally I suspect that the music / media companies are more than partially to blame. They complain when we download music without paying, but they're not happy even if we pay and I won't even get started on the imports side of things....

I've been invited to blog on the Irish Internet Association blog over the next couple of weeks. I promised to avoid anything too controversial and will probably touch on a number of "hot" topics, but what would other people like to see there?

The ICANN blog features another series of tips and tricks to aid RegisterFly victims escape to sanity.

I posted very briefly about the EUrid session at ICANN last week and had promised a followup. When I posted last week the session had only started to warmup and I had no idea how it was going to develop. I don't think EUrid could have predicted it either. As the session progressed we heard presentations from various members of Eurid staff. Initially the session seemed to be focussing primarily on the annual report and featured plenty of marketing fluff, that I already mentioned. As a European I didn't really need to be "treated" to a marketing video showing how incredibly "useful" a .eu domain could be. The annual report, and the glossy newsletter that accompanied it, took a very interesting spin on the sunrises and landrush. I'm sure lots of people were fascinated to know all about the incredibly long and totally useless domain names that people have registered. This is surely a lot more important to them than the abusive registrations of .eu domains by cybersquatters or the fees being paid to the Czech court for ADR. When the ADR costs were mentioned EUrid staff tried to shift the blame to the Czech court. Wow! That took a lot of balls, considering nobody from the Czech court was present to defend themselves. The annual report contains some intriguing data, particularly with reference to the correlation of ccTLD registrations compared to .eu registrations and the number of .eu registrations per head of population. Much to my amusement the inordinately high number of domains associated with Cyprus is actually mentioned, though no explanation is provided. For those of us who have been following the .eu fiasco from the outset we are more than capable of filling in the blanks - something that some of the registrars present were not afraid to mention. The EUrid response being "we're in litagation, so we can't talk about it", though they did say that Ovidio's legal representatives were in the audience. As the afternoon progressed we were treated to statistics and details of the technical aspects of the registry and how many connections, dns queries etc., they were dealing with. Of course, at some point, the registrars present could no longer resist the temptation. They simply had to pounce. When else would they get such a wonderful opportunity to raise their valid concerns with the registry? All the registrars seem to have been having very serious issues with domain transfers and trades. It wasn't merely a case of one or two registrars signalling isolated incidents. If that had been the case one might have been tempted to lay the blame on the respective registrars, however when you have a group of registrars in a room that represent several million domains globally and they all are complaining of the same issues you would have to wonder ... So what was EUrid response? In what has to have been the worse PR move I've ever seen EUrid management flatly refused to discuss the technical issues that were being raised. They went on the defensive and "got their backs up". While they claimed to be willing and interested to listen to registrars many of us present got the distinct impression that this was anything but the case. .eu is not a ccTLD. It is not a gTLD. It is meant to be the domain for Europe, its citizens and its businesses. .eu was brought about for the people of Europe by our elected representatives (one could argue about the finer points of this, but you get the idea). For an organisation to mismanage a TLD like this is bordering on criminal and personally I find it highly offensive as I am a European citizen. The IEDR, who manage the IE ccTLD, for example, are open to input from registrars and seem to learn from other registries experiences. Things I learnt from the session upset and worried me. Although EUrid was setup very recently and supposedly draws on the experience of several other ccTLDs they do not seem to be prepared technically. How is it possible that emails sent from them are not consistent? EUrid admitted that some of the emails were still being written by their staff. Registrars complained that some of the emails generated did not even refer to the domains being handled! As the session progressed and the discussion became more heated EUrid staff obviously could not handle the situation gracefully. They asked if people would prefer to continue the discussion of the issues and thus skip one of the other presentations, but once this was suggested by the registrars EUrid staff unilaterally decided that it was not the place for the discussion and that their "top-down" presentations were more suitable. Any suggestions that EUrid should learn from other registries were simply shot down. The general attitude from EUrid staff was one of condescension and misplaced pretension. I was so disgusted by their attitude that I didn't go back in for the second part after the coffee break and also passed up on the dinner they were holding that night. I normally wouldn't pass up the chance for a free dinner, but I suspected that the food would have stuck in my throat. I would like to feel that some of the issues stem from a linguistic barrier - as none of the EUrid staff's native tongue is English, while they insisted on holding the seminar in English. However I left feeling that the future of .eu was most definitely not in safe hands. John pointed me at another attendee's take on the afternoon's events.

I had to do a double-take on the news piece on RTE.ie. Yesterday was April Fool's day, so this has to be either true or badly timed:

Local authorities have refused to allow members of the public to use addresses in Irish in the new Register of Electors, which is being compiled at the moment.

Come again? You mean that they're rewriting the rules to suit themselves again... This would, I presume, be the same body of people who managed to drop thousands of people from the current register of electors, or maybe they're just a related group ....

The Report of the Irish language Ombudsman, An Coimisinéir Teanga, has suggested that such a practice undermines the concept of recognising addresses in Irish, or the use of bilingual placenames, signage or road signs.

That's fairly obvious ... Well done! While other governments are embracing national cultures ours is doing its best to subdue it!

I've been living in Carlow for over 3 years now. The local authority website is anything but a good source of information on local amenities, bars etc Oddly enough the recently launched Carlow.pl has addressed all that and more and provides a fairly comprehensive listing of bars, shops, transport and other useful information for local residents. The site, which is run by Krystian Kozerawski, who was recently nominated for an Irish blog award, is currently only available in Polish, but there are plans to translate all the content into English soon.

I finally got round to uploading all of my photos from ICANN Lisbon. I thought I'd taken more of them! You can see them on my Flickr account

I've enabled Amazon context links in the template here to see how they work. You may, therefore, notice some extra links in the body of posts. Simply hover your mouse over them to see if they are context links or not.